Winning in Flash – But Not Forcing it

Most people look at Tegile and think of us as a hybrid storage vendor. In several ways, that’s OK. Most of our business is in the hybrid storage space with systems that balance the performance of flash with the capacity of rotating disk. They are really nice systems for the bulk of the IT market. Gartner sizes this market at about $26 billion in 2017. Plenty of room for us to grow into.

What some may not know is that Tegile is a player in the all-flash business too. We just won a top-five spot in DCIG’s all-flash buyer’s guide. I believe the number five spot is actually very good for our flagship all-flash array – the HA2800. There are other companies that solely focus on all-flash, proclaiming that disk is dead and flash costs less than disk. Are these the same guys that have been saying tape is dead for 20 some years?

I venture to say that if all you do is flash, you had better rank pretty well in an all-flash buyer’s guide. Funny thing is, only one flash only vendor out ranked us, and they are so focused on the fringe of the market, we are happy to let them have it. What I am most proud of is that we beat out every other flash only vendor in the buyer’s guide.

This puts Tegile in a unique spot. We work objectively with our customers to determine their requirements and recommend either an all-flash or hybrid array to them. If you are a flash-only vendor, you will always recommend an all-flash array, regardless of the customer’s tolerance for latency. If you are a hybrid-only vendor, you will push your cache hit avoidance message into places that really do require an all-flash solution. If you would like to learn more about where to use all-flash or hybrid storage, check out the webinar my buddy Scott Lowe and I are hosting on April 10th. Scott has been a CIO and is now an independent consultant who helps medium and large enterprises modernize their data centers and is an expert in virtualization, storage and many other parts of the IT stack.